Magorn:thomps: has america ever been first in these studies? the media makes a big deal out of our slipping advantage in educated kids, but i feel like i've been hearing that same story my entire life.

From about the time this went up:[www.vibrationdata.com image 259x186]

to the time we did this:

[static.ddmcdn.com image 400x394]

There was a massive concerted and antional effort to improve Math and science skills in this country and train more scientists and engineers since it was consiered a matter of national security. After that? Not so much.

That's because we won. Who keeps training after they win and there are no more competitions??

timujin:umad: timujin: thomps: timujin: Perhaps because instead of focusing on "skills" the modern education system focuses on passing standardized tests.

then why didn't we do better on this standardized test?

Kind of my point. They focus so much on passing one particular test, rather than learning simply how arithmetic and mathematics work, that when presented with anything other than that test students perform poorly.

That may have been your point, but his was that our kids should be acing the shiat out of that test since that is the only thing they are studying for, except they aren't.

No, it's not. This is a different test than the one they're studying for.

So they focus on passing standardized tests but they don't focus on passing the standardized tests. Got it.

DrewCurtisJr:Need to feel superior to 79% of U.S. eighth graders and 100% of eighth graders in Iran?

rwfan:Blue_Blazer: The other thing that is often left out: the USA educates a higher percentage of its children than other countries. These studies are about as useful as comparing elite prep schools to the average American school.

That is certainly not true of Finland and most of Europe.Percentages of children receiving a secondary education:[www.childinfo.org image 552x243] As you can see the US lags most of Europe.

On the other hand, at least Massachusetts, where my kids go to school, is kicking butt.

/suck it bible belt.

You know what Finland and Massachusetts have that California and Alabama don't have?

TheBeastOfYuccaFlats:Rent Party: TheBeastOfYuccaFlats:I can tell you that in IT it is *routinely* the case that companies underbid, basically because they can then justify an H1B. I watched my own company need but not hire anyone for an Oracle DBA position for 18 months because they didn't want to pay the going rate for someone with the skillset required.

If I'm operating that business, and I have an open rec for 18 months, it would make me question the need for the position in the first place.

It was a situation where the existing people could do station-holding on issues basically forever, but it required someone with a more advanced skillset and prior experience to move forward. I have no doubt that there was a business impact in terms of new project progress.

YEP!"we don't need a QA or support team. the engineers can do that too."6 months later: "hey engineering, how come you haven't built any new stuff."engineering: "we're overworked. At least let us hire some more people."management: "look, I can't give you a hiring budget, because you haven't been productive for the last 6 months. Take sales for example! They really make things happen!"engineering: "well, they sold all the crap that didn't exist at the time and still doesn't because we're too overloaded with support work to build it..."management: "ok, fine, I'll hire some trained monkeys to do support work."6 months later: "you told me those trained monkeys would solve the problem"engineering: "well no, we told you we needed some more support people, not trained monkeys, actual people...."management: "you're even less productive! Look how good these trained monkeys are though! They're escalating tickets faster than ever, and you guys just sit on them"engineering: "yeah, that's because the monkeys don't actually work the tickets. They just instantly escalate them to engineering, so then we have to do the support work while putting up the guise of training the monkeys who are in fact untrainable...."management: "screw it, you're all fired. get me some trained monkey developers for less than half the price. Then I'll change the sales guy's title to 'Architect' and have him lord over the monkeys."support monkey: "ticket too hard, escalate to engineering monkey"engineering monkey: "ticket too hard, escalate to 'Architect'"architect monkey: "delegate ticket to support monkeys, send emails letting management know that I'm on the case and stuff's about to get done"infinite loop

ok, sorry I'm having one of those days and this was a good opportunity for catharsis.We're actually hiring engineers again. People finally realized the monkey pyramid scheme was a bad idea.But they only replaced the engineering piece of the pyramid sales and support are still morans.

thomps:timujin: Perhaps because instead of focusing on "skills" the modern education system focuses on passing standardized tests.

then why didn't we do better on this standardized test?

I think the key word that you need to realize here is "standardized". See, to a naive person, that word means that everybody does it in the same way--or in this case everybody teaches to the same test.That's not the case however, you see. I'll refer you to the dictionary definition of the word standardize:standardize (v.): to do something in a ridiculous way, that is different from the ridiculous way that other countries do it.

See, I hope that clears things up. Those Korean kids, they're just not meeting the right standards.